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Male Film Critic Tells Women ‘The Revenant’ Is Not For Them; Gets Ass Handed To Him | Film News

Set in the early 19th century, Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s The Revenant looks like a violent, masculine hellride of a film. I do not say masculine because the film is aimed at a male audience, or that women will be unable to enjoy it; I say masculine because it deals with rugged looking men, in traditionally male gender roles, fighting each other to solve their problems.

Starring a grizzled Leonardo DiCaprio and a rugged Tom Hardy, the film follows two men trapped in a cycle of violence and revenge across the American frontier. One film critic, Jeffrey Wells, recently made the unfortunate mistake of tweeting a particularly unfortunate message after seeing an advanced screening of the film. Wells runs a particularly inauspicious little blog called Hollywood Elsewhere, which he uses to voice his opinion and thoughts on film and television. The unfortunate message previously mentioned was tweeted from the blogs twitter, and you can read it below:

Yep, it’s pretty terrible; casual misogyny in full force. As most films follow the male gaze, women have been forced to identify with male protagonists for a long time now, this is not a problem; the issue with Wells‘ tweet is the presupposition that women cannot handle violence, gore, or action based narratives, because they’re full of sugar and pink balloons and have never had to deal with such issues in their domesticated, less-authentic lives I guess. Whatever the reasoning, it was a pretty stupid thing to say, and Twitter had something to say about it. Here are but a few of the responses:

The worse thing is, after the tirade of tweets letting Wells know he’d offended about half of the world’s population, he took to his blog to defend his actions, stating “I’m not stupid, and I know that generalizations always get you into trouble“. This isn’t generalisation I’m afraid, this is sexism; repressed, unfounded, damaging sexism, and now you need to reassess how you look at film, women, and the world at large. The Revenant will be released in the UK on January 15, 2016.